Arte Público Press: Built Book by Book

Nicolás Kanellos, the founder and director of Arte Público Press, lounges in the new book warehouse at the University of Houston. Arte Público is the oldest and largest publisher of U.S. Hispanic literature in the country. (Karen Warren/Chronicle)

Nicolás Kanellos raised his voice above the clamor of guests — mingling between bookshelves and a fragrant Mexican buffet — to welcome them to the new home of Arte Público Press.

“You found your way through the labyrinth,” Kanellos joked, a reference to the publishing house’s new address, deep inside the University of Houston’s Energy Research Park.

As founder and director of Arte Público, the oldest and largest publisher of U.S. Hispanic literature in the country, Kanellos, 67, has been pushing books about Latinos for more than three decades. When he launched the nonprofit press in 1979, educators still were haggling about how to wedge this growing population into the curriculum. Today, UH offers a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies.

Arte Público has published more than 500 titles to date. But as recently as last year, Kanellos and his staff of 40 shuttled between three UH offices and a vermin-infested warehouse to do their jobs.

“All kinds of animalitos lived in the warehouse,” Kanellos told the crowd at the open house this fall. “They loved our books.”

Now, all the offices are housed together. Graphic Emilio Sanchez lithographs hang on the walls. And the attached warehouse — as big as a football field — bears no sign of scurrying paper-eaters.

After 33 years, Arte Público Press has found a proper home.

“The House on Mango Street”

In 1979, UH offered Kanellos a deal he couldn’t refuse: a tenure-track position, a place for his magazine, “Revista Chicano-Riqueña” (later “The Americas Review”), and a home for his fledgling press.

The ambitious academic, who grew up in New York, New Jersey and Puerto Rico, already was acquainted with the Lone Star State; he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. But when the UH offer came in, Kanellos was eight years into a tenure-track post at the University of Indiana-Gary.

Northern Indiana in the 1970s was, in Kanellos’ words, “a cornucopia of Hispanics.” And in Gary, a steel mill town on the edge of Lake Michigan, he and others struggled to create a thriving arts community. Arte Público Press — the name came out of the public art movement, a grass-roots commitment to local cultural arts — had published just one book. But the area was impoverished and there were few resources to support their efforts. When the UH job came up, Kanellos headed back to Texas.

The move was prescient. Today, more than 37 percent of all Texas residents are Hispanic.

Kanellos is quick to note that Hispanics aren’t the only audience for Arte Público books — “I go to bookstores and I watch Anglo mothers buy our bilingual books to help their kids learn Spanish,” he said — but the shifting demographics haven’t hurt.

Initially, most of the books were aimed at educators and academics. But in 1984, Arte Público published a debut novel about a young Chicana who moves with her parents to a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago.

“The House on Mango Street,” written by Sandra Cisneros, wasn’t an instant hit. But it has grown deep roots over the years and become a contemporary classic.

“The early ’80s was the beginning of the multicultural movement,” Kanellos explained. “Both Stanford and Harvard democratized their curriculum for basic freshman courses. They included ‘The House on Mango Street’ and other books by Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians. … We started getting orders from bookstores when previously our books were only in universities.”

Arte Público cross-marketed Cisneros’ novel to adult and young adult audiences, which is how it found its way into the high school curriculum.

In the early ’90s, though, Cisneros broke her contract with Arte Público — a contract that was weak and out-of-date, Kanellos acknowledged — and took the book to Vintage.

It hurt.

“Today, that book is in every school,” Kanellos said. “That book would have helped us a lot.”

Victor Villaseñor

“Rain of Gold”

But there were other books.

In 1991, the press landed its biggest hit to date with “Rain of Gold,” Victor Villaseñor’s family memoir about his parents’ migration from Mexico to California.

Originally, Villaseñor signed on with Putnam publishers. “Rain of Gold” was to be their lead title and the author had already taken half the $150,000 advance. But when he saw the proofs, his heart sank.

“They changed the name to ‘Rio Grande’ and they called it fiction,” said Villaseñor, who spent 12 years researching his parents’ story.

Emboldened by a phone call from Alex Haley — who told him publishers had tried the same sort of thing with “Roots” — Villaseñor met with a Putnam representative and ultimately bought back the rights to his book. His mother mortgaged her home so he could return the $75,000.

“I was blackballed in New York,” the author recalled.

Someone recommended he contact Arte Público Press, but Villaseñor had a heck of a time convincing Kanellos to publish “Rain of Gold.” Kanellos told him he simply didn’t have the money or the sales force.

But Villaseñor persisted, and Kanellos finally agreed. This time, Villaseñor made do with a $1,500 advance and Arte Público published the book. It was a huge risk for the small, nonprofit press.

“We put all our resources and all our time into it,” Kanellos said. “We had never published a hardcover book.”

But Arte Público was savvy about marketing. Kanellos and Villaseñor trumpeted the David and Goliath backstory to anyone who would listen, including Publisher’s Weekly, which ran an article about Villaseñor buying back the rights to his book. Before long, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ran stories and then the Mellon Foundation gave Arte Público $50,000 to print more copies of the book. “Rain of Gold” took off.

“That book spoke to so many people whose families fled the Mexican Revolution to come to the U.S.,” Kanellos said. “People related to it. They heard their parents and grandparents tell these stories.”

Piñata Books

Despite the success of “Rain of Gold,” Arte Público’s bread and butter was still books for university classrooms. In addition, the press was ignoring the very group that held the key to the future of U.S. Hispanic literature.

“Hispanic growth really revolves around a very young population,” Kanellos explained. “The majority is in elementary and high school.”

To promote literacy and expand its reach, Arte Público launched Piñata Books in 1994. Dedicated to children’s and young adult titles — including bilingual picture and flip books

“Piñata Books absolutely saved this press,” said Marina Tristán, Arte Público’s assistant director and Kanellos’ co-worker of more than 25 years.

Bilingual books are a bridge between the English spoken at school and the Spanish spoken at home, Tristán explained.

One of Ray Villareal’s Piñata titles, “Body Slammed,” follows a San Antonio teenager whose life gets mixed up in the world of luchadores — masked professional wrestlers. Villareal writes for 9- to 12-year old boys who aren’t reading on grade level and aren’t interested in books at their reading level, so he labors to pick topics and formats to hold their interest.

“Reluctant readers like short chapters and lots of dialogue,” said Villareal, a retired teacher who sold his father’s poems door-to-door as a child in Dallas’ Little Mexico neighborhood.

Ray Villareal, Gwendolyn Zepeda and Rice professor Jose Aranda at the open house celebrating Arte Público's move to a larger location. (Gary Fountain/for the Chronicle)

Houston’s Gwendolyn Zepeda, whose bilingual children’s titles — including “Growing Up with Tamales/Los Tamales de Ana” — are published by Piñata Books, said children are the toughest critics.

“Kids will call you out, Zepeda said. “They’ll tell you that the picture doesn’t match what’s being said, that the translation is bad.”

Funding from the Texas Commission on the Arts allowed Zepeda and other Piñata authors to tour tiny towns in the Rio Grande Valley. Over the years, the Raúl Tijerina Jr. Foundation and the Texas Book Festival have funneled Piñata books to school districts along the border.

“That area is one of the poorest in the nation — over 90 percent Hispanic,” Kanellos said. “These kids rarely get to see themselves reflected in a book.”

Bouncing back and e-books

By the 2000s, Arte Público was pulling in about $1.5 million annually from book sales and earning additional money from the interest of various endowments.

Then the recession hit in 2008.

“The endowments went underwater, and since then we haven’t gotten a penny from interest,” Kanellos said.

At the same time, the state legislatures in Arte Público’s biggest markets — California and Texas — cut the budgets of public schools and libraries. Piñata Books took a direct hit.

In recent years, book sales have levelled off at about $1 million annually.

Arte Público received stimulus money from the Recovery Act, which helped Kanellos avoid layoffs, and social media is helping promote books and authors in a less expensive way.

The press also has begun converting its titles to e-books; new books are converted right away, but staff is playing catch-up with older titles.

Although it’s a challenging market, digital sales are climbing each month, to places as far-flung as India and Serbia.

“For so many years, no one was publishing Latino literature but us,” Kanellos said. “We have to make sure our books are available to Latinos in this new format.”

Ironically, one of the top sellers is Villaseñor’s “Rain of Gold.”

“The publishing world is still run by so many yes men and frightened people,” Villaseñor said. “But Nick … Nick has always had guts.”

–Maggie Galehouse

Holding onto history: the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project

Ask Nicolás Kanellos about his “recovery project” and his face brightens.

This is his baby.

Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project — that’s the official title — is an ongoing effort to preserve the legacy of U.S. Hispanics. University of Houston graduate students and other scholars are busy loading hundreds of thousands of documents into an online database.

These are newspaper articles, diaries, private letters and other primary sources by or about Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and other Hispanics who came to the U.S. and passed on their stories and traditions. As scholars and textbooks writers look at these materials — which range from colonial times through 1960 — new pieces of history make their way into the K-12 and college curriculum.

“Today, the terms are interchangeable,” Nicolás Kanellos says. “But Hispanic and Latino are translations of what communities used to call themselves.”

Spanish people of the Americas referred to themselves as Hispanoamericanos, which got shortened over time to Hispanics, he said.

When this group wanted to include countries such as Brazil and Haiti and Martinique — where the dominant languages are not Spanish but are, indeed, Latin-based romance languages — they used the term Latinoamericanos, now abridged to Latinos.